GRADE 11 SBA REVIEW AFTERIMAGE RIVERTEETH INTERPRET LITERARY ELEMENTS* ANALYZE CHARACTERIZATION*

Transcription

1 GRADE 11 SBA REVIEW AFTERIMAGE RIVERTEETH INTERPRET LITERARY ELEMENTS* ANALYZE CHARACTERIZATION*

2 Afterimage River Teeth By Margot Singer We are packing up the house. The air is pulpy with the smells of cardboard and newsprint, and every room is lined with boxes, flaps fanned open at the top. We pack and pack eighty boxes already, and so far, with two weeks still to go, we haven t missed a thing. What do we keep it all for? Books and more books; unused wedding presents and 5 mismatched wine glasses; worn-out stuffed animals and outgrown toys; sheaves of letters; boxes of loose photographs; a landfill of sweaters, shoes, and clothes: the weighty apparatus of four lives. It will take more than two hundred book boxes, dish barrels, mirror boxes, mattress crates, a football field of paper, bubble wrap, and tape to contain it all. We want to contain it. We want to hold it tight There s no place like home, Dorothy chants, clicking her ruby heels as she recites her dream-dissolving spell. I ve moved half a dozen times since I first left my parents house for college, twenty-five years ago this fall, and sometimes I wonder if there is any place I ll ever really feel at home. I feel loose-footed on this spinning planet, as displaced as those mountains vanished in the fog. Of course, you don t have to move physically to leave 15 yourself behind. Something is lost with every tick of the second hand on the clock.... My parents still live in the house in which I grew up, and my childhood room remains almost exactly the way I left it when I last lived there at eighteen. It s a shrine to my long-vanished child-self, a garden gone to seed, a tangle of dusty paperbacks, knickknacks, and disheveled dolls. My mother refuses to throw anything away, although lately she s been 20 urging me to come and weed things out myself. I don t want to leave you with a mess to clean up when I die, she says. Now that we re moving, she says, it s time. Back in Boston for a visit, I shake open a large black trash bag and sit down on the floor of my old room. From a built-in cabinet, I exhume a postcard of Baryshnikov in midleap, a 25 silver-plated pendant in the shape of a Hershey s Kiss, faded mimeographs of high school class songs and summer reading lists, stacks of letters, a flowered fabric-covered scrapbook (blank). I remember each of these objects perfectly, though I haven t thought of them in years. I take a breath, open the trash bag, and stuff them in. My mother comes in and perches on the edge of the bed. You don t need to throw 30 everything away, you know, she says, reaching for a postcard with a cartoon of a girl with googly eyes on the front and my long-dead paternal grandmother s spidery handwriting on the back. My most beloved darling. It s dated August I would have been seven then, the same age as my daughter now. Will we be sitting together like this, looking at postcards from my own mother, when my daughter is forty-three? 35 My mother says, You know, you only need to get rid of those things you don t want to keep. What don t I want? I fish the pendant out of the trash bag, fingering the Kiss s paper pull-tab, which reads I Love You, and which, amazingly, is still in tact. I give it to my

3 daughter, along with the scrapbook and a doll with floozy blond hair and tattered clothes 40 and pack them all into yet another box to be shipped to our new Ohio home. I retrieve the letters, the postcards, the mimeographs; I open the cabinet and put them back. To my surprise my mother is satisfied with this. In fact she seems relieved. Everything will be here for you whenever you want it, she says. Margot Singer excerpted from Afterimage River Teeth, Spring 2008

4 QUESTIONS Strand IX: Literature Benchmark IX-B3 Analyze ways in which writers play with language (e.g., the use of pun, euphemism, oxymoron, verbal irony, hyperbole, understatement) 1. In stating We want to contain it (lines 8 and 9), the narrator suggests that she wishes to (1) cling to the past 2) bury old feuds (3) erase unpleasant memories (4) limit her inner fears 2. The simile displaced as those mountains vanished in the fog (lines 13 and 14) suggests that the narrator feels (1) fortunate (2) encouraged (3) unsettled (4) fearful 3. The narrator s description of her childhood room (lines 16 through 19) was foreshadowed by which phrase? (1) The air is pulpy (line 1) (2) What do we keep it all for? (line 4) (3) unused wedding presents (line 4) (4) I feel loose-footed (line 13) 4. By urging the narrator to weed things out (line 20), her mother is expressing her (1) thoughts about the future (2) concerns with personal safety (3) anxiety to redecorate the room (4) nervousness about neighbors opinions 5. The narrator s passing on the pendant, scrapbook, and doll to her daughter can be seen as (1) selfish (3) educational (4) revealing (2) insulting 6. The conclusion of the passage suggests that the narrator and her mother (1) share common values (2) reach an emotional crisis

5 (3) compete for the child s affection (4) begin to drift apart ANSWERS